Stay On the Cutting Edge of Construction Tech

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we're joined by Anna Berger, CEO and Co-Founder of Trayd. Anna grew up in a New York construction family, watching her father's back-office fill with filing cabinets, stacks of paper timecards, and systems that didn't talk to each other. In 2021 she founded Trayd with CTO Cara Kessler to fix it: an all-in-one back-office operating system that automates payroll, HR, and compliance for union and prevailing wage trade contractors running 50 to 1,000 people in the field.

We discuss what payroll week actually looks like for a 300 person electrical contractor, from a Monday morning stack of 250 paper timecards, through union rates, shift premiums and overtime rules worked out by hand in Excel, to the union benefit reports and workers' comp filings at the other end, and how Trayd compresses that full week into a run of thirty minutes or less. Anna explains why she believes construction has a software problem rather than an adoption problem, why point solutions have left back offices running eight systems that don't speak to each other, how pairing clock-in with visible earnings drove field adoption past 99%, and why structuring the industry's data has to come before AI can deliver anything meaningful. 

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we're joined by Shelley Copsey, co-founder and CEO of FYLD. Shelley shares FYLD's unconventional origin story as a research project for one of Canada's largest pension plans, and how her background in infrastructure and business transformation led her to build an AI-powered frontline intelligence platform for utilities, heavy civils, and energy organizations across the UK and the Americas.  We discuss how FYLD replaces paperwork-heavy safety processes with short videos from field workers, using AI to assess risk in real time, coach workers toward better risk assessments, and give remote managers visibility into which crews need attention most. Shelley explains why winning the trust of frontline workers, not just improving back-office efficiency, is the key to adoption, and how FYLD is helping cut standing time and improve safety outcomes on site.

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we're joined by Jake Olsen, CEO of Stratus. Jake shares how his career spanning structural engineering, construction tech at DeWalt, and hands-on time inside a mechanical contractor's fab shop led him to take the helm at Stratus, an operating system for MEP contractors that digitizes the full workflow from BIM through fabrication, logistics, and field installation.  We discuss why most MEP contractors are still running on PDFs, spreadsheets, and color-coded stickers, how Stratus connects live model data directly to the fab shop floor, and what Jake's State of MEP report revealed about the growing gap between contractors who have embraced fabrication and those who haven't.  The conversation explores how off-site prefabrication is helping contractors solve the labor shortage, why the most competitive MEP contractors are starting to run their businesses more like manufacturers, and how going fully digital gives contractors the real-time data they need to actually improve their operations over time. 

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we're joined by Mallorie Brodie, CEO and Co-Founder of Bridgit. Mallorie co-founded Bridgit in 2012 and has built it into the go-to workforce planning platform for general contractors across North America and beyond.  We discuss how contractors have traditionally managed their workforce, from manually moving people across whiteboards, to operating in regional silos with no visibility across their full organization. Whereas Bridgit helps construction firms schedule the right people to the right projects at the right time. Mallorie explains why the industry's workforce challenge is really a skills problem rather than a headcount problem, and why that distinction changes how contractors should be planning.  The conversation explores what contractors need to do differently as experienced project managers and superintendents near retirement, how technology adoption in construction has shifted from resistance to genuine excitement, and what the firms pulling ahead of the industry have in common when it comes to planning their people.

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we’re joined by Francesco "Frio" Iorio, Co-Founder and CEO of Augmenta. Frio shares how his decades of work pioneering generative design and computational science at IBM Research and Autodesk led to the creation of Augmenta, an AI platform that takes high-level design intent from engineers and architects and translates it into fully constructible 3D designs for the critical systems inside buildings, starting with electrical.

We discuss why traditional BIM modeling remains slow, manual, and dependent on a shrinking pool of specialized experts, how Augmenta acts as a virtual BIM design team behind every contractor's screen, and the synthetic data approach inspired by self-driving cars that made training spatial AI possible despite there being "no Wikipedia of buildings."

The conversation explores how AI is extending the reach of engineering and BIM teams rather than replacing them, helping reduce waste and rework caused by design errors, unlocking what-if scenarios and optionality that were previously cost-prohibitive, and laying the foundation for AI-assisted design of whole buildings as Augmenta expands from electrical into mechanical, plumbing, and HVAC performance.

In this episode of The Construction Revolution Podcast, we’re joined by N K, Co-Founder and CEO of Track3D. N K shares how his background in computer vision, AI, and robotics led to the creation of Track3D, a reality intelligence platform designed to automate construction progress monitoring. We discuss why progress tracking remains largely manual across job sites, the challenges this creates for accuracy and coordination, and how Track3D delivers real-time visibility into what work is completed, where it is completed, and whether it is done correctly. The conversation explores how reality intelligence is reducing rework, improving communication between contractors, trades, and owners, and laying the foundation for more predictable, data-driven project delivery across the construction lifecycle.